Growing and Understanding Local Produce in the Northern Territory (Darwin region) is a community project.

The GULP project aims to connect community through the sharing of culinary and gardening skills and ideas. We support people to use local produce grown in back gardens, community gardens and local farms. This reduces food miles, connects people to place, promotes healthy eating and allows people to share their knowledge cross culturally within the community, online and face to face.

About Us

GULP NT (Growing and Using Local Produce) was the outcome of a group of local Darwin residents wanting to encourage the Darwin community to embrace local Tropical produce through community events and workshops and networking people and places together.

The “GULP” project formalised these get togethers and threw them open to the wider community hosting workshops and food shares in public spaces in association with other community groups. Thanks to funding in 2013 and 2014 from The Community Benefit fund (Department of business NT Government) and City of Darwin Environment grants we were able to host workshops free of charge for the Darwin community.

The project works with many other community organisations in Darwin including community gardens, school kitchen gardens, Darwin Community Arts, multicultural groups, market stall holders, backyard growers and interested individuals.

So far workshop and ingredient topics have included – cooking okra, wet season greens, preparing coconuts to make coconut milk and oil, growing Asian wet season beans and crops and cooking cassava roots into sweet and savoury dishes, multicultural uses of Banana, bitter melon and taro, eggplant dishes and more recently the use of native bush tucker.

We aim to include anyone new to Darwin, the Tropics and its produce as well as those already passionate and knowledgeable. These connections to food through community are essential due to the remote location of Darwin and its reliance on trucked in food supplies and creating community is important in a vibrant, multicultural city.

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Contact Us

We would love to hear from you if you know about and cook with local produce.

You could send us a recipe, and we will try it out and publish it.

You can share your tropical cooking ideas and skills, and we can involve you in the project.

We would also love to hear from you if you want to know more about the program and learn more about local produce.